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Carbon cycle tracers, an infographic
I’m happy to present an InfoGraphic on Carbon Cycle Tracers created by University of Arizona art students Melissa Yepiz and Luke Williams in Prof Karen Zimmerman’s course on infographics. Creating this infographic on complex scientific concepts was not an easy task, but Melissa and Luke did an incredible job. Through this collaboration they have provided me with an invaluable resource for sharing my research to a range of audiences (and in a much more aesthetically pleasing way than usual). I learned a lot in the process, including how to better explain my science and to get down to the fundamentals of the message I wanted to share. I was blown away by the talent…
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Soil art!
I’ve had the pleasure of working with two fantastic UA art students (Luke Williams and Melissa Yepiz) through an Infographics class with Prof. Karen Zimmerman. Stay tuned for our infographic on carbon cycle tracers! As a side project, I’ve given the students some of each of the 20 soil samples from my recent study to constrain soil fluxes of carbon cycle tracers (COS and 18O-CO2, see story). I asked them to make a creative piece with the soils, highlighting differences in color, texture, etc… Luke’s piece nicely contrasts soil color using red Colorado river, gray Moab soils, and black Hawaiian soils within a geometric framework burned into wood. I’ll look forward to…
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Soil survey: microbial, chemical and physical drivers of carbon cycle tracers
Two trace gases (carbonyl sulfide and the oxygen isotopes of CO2) show promise to help disentangle carbon cycle processes, but their soil fluxes need additional characterization. As in leaves, we anticipate that carbonic anhydrase (CA) enzymes in soil microbes drive uptake of atmospheric COS by soils (COS + H2O -> CO2 + H2S) and exchange of the oxygen isotopic signature between atmospheric CO2 and water (CO2 + H2O <-> HCO3– + H+). We performed a soil survey to test whether soil microbial CA drive the soil fluxes of these two potential carbon cycle tracers. By measuring the microbial, chemical, and physical properties of a diverse set of soils, we set out to determine…
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Manuscript presenting first yearlong study of carbonyl sulfide fluxes
Our manuscript on the “Seasonal fluxes of carbonyl sulfide in a midlatitude forest” was just recently published in PNAS (document online). Lead author Róisín Commane and I met at Harvard Forest where she installed an Aerodyne Research Inc., laser spectrometer to study the seasonal behavior of carbonyl sulfide (interchangeably called OCS and COS by different groups). Of particular interest are the common pathways to both CO2 and OCS, for example both trace gases react with carbonic anhydrase enzymes in leaves. This commonality may provide a quantitative, independent measure of the photosynthetic pathway for carbon assimilation. In this study, we find that vegetative uptake accounted for 72% of annual uptake of OCS, and nighttime uptake through stomata and…